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Introduction

Venezia e Napoli is usually waved away as a rather insignificant group of encore pieces, but while they are obviously lighter fare, they merit high praise for their sheer beauty and ingenuity. Each piece is based on what was familiar material in the streets of Italy at the time of their conception.

Gondoliera is described by Liszt in the score as La biondina in gondoletta—Canzone di Cavaliere Peruchini (Beethoven’s setting of it, WoO157/12, for voice and piano trio just describes it as a Venetian folk-song, and Peruchini remains elusive) and he treats it in a much gentler way than in the earlier version with a particularly fine verse with tremolo accompaniment; the tremolo guides a very dark musing upon Rossini’s Canzone del Gondoliere—‘Nessùn maggior dolore’ (Otello) which itself recalls Dante’s Inferno (‘There is no greater sorrow than to remember past happiness in time of misery’); and the Tarantella—incorporating themes by Guillaume Louis Cottrau (1797–1847)—emerges from the depths, much more subtle than in its previous, primary-coloured garb, but ultimately triumphantly boisterous.

Recordings

The Liszt Sonata is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the repertoire, and recordings are suitably copious, but when an artist of Hamelin’s virtuoso pedigree wishes to tackle it no excuse need be made for an additional version. This is a major Liszt ...» More

'A familiar enough masterpiece yet typically spiced by Howard with some fascinating side-steps and discoveries' (Gramophone)'This disc is studded with pleasures, even (especially in the Petrarch sonnets) with flashes of ecstasy. Fine sound too' (Fanfare, USA)» More

Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano p ...» More

Pianist Llyr Williams, acclaimed soloist, accompanist and chamber musician chose to focus on virtuosic selections from Franz Liszt. Highly sought after as a performer in the United Kingdom, he was awarded a South Bank Sky Arts Award in 2012 for h ...» More

Details

As a sparkling aperitif to the magisterial Sonata, we have a short set of three pieces that Liszt originally intended as a musical digestif. Venezia e Napoli was published in 1861 as a ‘supplement’ to the Italian volume of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, and offers varied treatments of tunes probably first heard by the composer during his travels around Italy with Marie d’Agoult in the late 1830s. The passage of time seems to have imparted a warm nostalgic glow to this journey, most evident in the magical coda added to Gondoliera, a gently undulating piece based on the song ‘La biondina in gondoletta’ by Giovanni Battista Peruchini. The ensuing Canzone is a darkly passionate arrangement of a similar song, this time from Rossini’s opera Otello, which features an obsessively pessimistic gondolier—a character for whom we look in vain in Shakespeare’s original text—who has the habit of regaling his captive audiences with Dante’s ‘Nessùn maggior dolore’ (‘There is no greater sorrow’). Fortunately the sparklingly high spirits of Liszt’s concluding bravura Tarantella, based on some lively themes by Guillaume-Louis Cottrau, peremptorily banish the glum gondolier back to his murky lagoon.